VOID self (temporarily out of reach)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At times I go through a plethora of emotions and I m not sure why am I so perplexed????????? I totally lose interest in whatever I do and I guess each one of us at some point of time, pass through this phase of emptiness. Well I call this “VOID phase”. Life is wily at times and we find it monotonous and flat. At this point we feel stagnant and sluggish, a state where anguish soars and level of confidence sours. Maybe this is why we go through this phase. I am trying to figure out the reason solely based on my experience. This phase of “nothingness” (as I call it) turns me into a completely new person I am unaware of for a brief period of time. I am not referring to the usual mood swings that we go through due to various emotional factors.

In this intermittent state, I remain aloof, barely talking to people. May be because I don’t want them to know I could be so emotional or may be a bit of pride in admitting I m distressed. I become arid and all liveliness drains out of me. Even the smallest discomfort can make me shed tears (though not very often).An all time low confidence courts me and I am in constant search for reassurances from anywhere and anybody. I just turn into a zombie (not generalizing… this is about me...)

Off late I have started doing a bit of research to prevent falling into this momentous unapproachable status. One thing I have found that trying out new things or pursuing what we like the most can definitely push us on and on. Actually I feel better when I have vented my thoughts through this write up. So I just figured out a way to avert the “out of reach” state. So it’s just that out of bloom we find our fixes. And this effort has to come from us (self realization!!!).

I haven’t done with the research part and it will keep continuing. Next time I will definitely come up with a lot more ways to stop drooling back to the VOID state.

AN INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

DEFINITON:

•Business intelligence (BI) is defined as a set of concepts and procedures that aid in making business decisions based on the facts.

BI is:

•Collecting and refining information from different sources.

•Analyzing and presenting information in useful ways.

WHY BI?

•Provides easy access to information.

•Consistent view of information.

•Helps in making both long term and short term goals.

•Maintains an adaptive and resilient source of information.

•Provides control access to the data.

DATA WAREHOUSING

•Data warehousing is a means to retrieve and analyze data, to extract, transform and load data.

•BI is accomplished using data warehouses.

DATA WAREHOUSE

•A collection of data from multiple sources

ØWithin the organization

ØOutside the organization

•Includes summary, historical as well as operational data.

•Cleansing of data is required.

TYPES OF DATA WAREHOUSES

•Top-down

ØCentralized.

•Bottom-up

ØDistributed.

ARCHITECTURE OF DATA WAREHOUSE

The components of the architecture are

ØSource systems.

ØData staging area.

ØPresentation server.

ØEnd user data access.

SOURCE SYSTEMS

•A system that captures the transactions of the business.

•Also known as legacy systems.

•Maintains little historical data.

•A stovepipe.

DATA STAGING AREA

•A set of processes that clean, transform, combine, de-duplicate, household, archive and prepare source data for

use in the data warehouse.

•Involves activities of sorting and sequential processing.

BASIC PROCESSES OF DATA STAGING

•Extracting.

•Transforming.

•Loading and indexing.

•Quality Assurance Checking.

•Release/Publishing.

•Updating

•Querying.

•Data Feedback/feeding in Reverse.

•Auditing.

•Securing.

•Backing up and Recovering.

PRESENTATION SERVER

•The target machine on which the data warehouse data is organized and stored for querying purpose.

•Data is presented and stored in a dimensional framework.

•This consists of

ØData marts

ØData warehouse

ØOperational data store

DATA MARTS

•Logical subset of the data warehouse.

•This consist of data restricted to a a single process or a group of related business processes.

•Represented using a dimension model.

•They must be built from conformed dimensions and conformed facts.

DATA WAREHOUSE

•Query able source of data.

•Facilitate reporting and analysis of information.

•Union of all data marts.

OPERATIONAL DATA STORE(ODS)

•This is designed to contain low level atomic data with limited history that is captured in real time or near real time

on a less frequent basis.

•The contents of ODS are updated frequently.

•It is designed to perform simple queries on small amount of data.

•4 types of ODS:

ØClass I

ØClass II

ØClass III

ØClass IV

•The original ODS systems were developed as a reporting tool for administrative purposes. They were usually

updated daily and provided reports about business transactions for that day, such as sales totals or orders filled.

This type of system is now referred to as a Class III ODS.

• With changes in technology and business needs, the Class II ODS evolved to track more complex information

such as product and location codes, and to update the database more frequently (perhaps hourly) to reflect

changes.

•Class I ODS systems arose from the development of customer relationship management (CRM). In Class I

systems, synchronous or near-synchronous updates are used to provide customers with consistently valid and

organized information.

•The Class IV ODS, was recently developed with an added capacity for more interaction between the data

warehouse or data mart and the ODS.

END USER DATA ACCESS:

•Users query, analyze and present information stored in data warehouses to support a business need.

PS : The above concepts discussed as merely based on my understanding. Any misstated information is the result of same.